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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation by Cyndia Susan Clegg
  • Tamara Atkin (bio)
Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation. By Cyndia Susan Clegg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vi + 222.

In the well-known Epilogue that Puck speaks at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he offers a preemptive apology for wasting the audience’s time:

If we shadows have offended,Think but this and all is mended:That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.

(5.1.440–43)

As interpretive advice it is pretty thin, but like the suggestion made by the Prologue in Henry V, that audience members should simply “piece out” any “imperfections” with their thoughts, it emphasizes the role of audience imagination in creating the theatrical event (Prologue l. 24). What audience members may have thought is the subject of Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences, which examines how the habits of different reading communities or “clusters” (4) may have affected their interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

As a study that is interested in the way narratives about the emergence of a public sphere interact with book history, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences belongs to the recent material turn in reception studies. But where a number of scholars have focused on the material evidence of the readerly consumption of Shakespeare in copies of his works or elsewhere, Clegg’s interest is in the reading material that informed his earliest audiences. Isolating the humanistic, legal, religious, and political texts likely to have appealed to different discursive communities, Clegg resists conceiving of these audiences monolithically; instead, celebrating their plurality, she explores “the multiplicity of meanings any given theatrical experience might generate” (7). One of the advantages of this approach is that the definitions of “reading” employed by the book are necessarily broad, encompassing the well-studied intellectual habits of homosocial elites as well as the “community” and “auditory” practices of men and women often excluded from traditional accounts of reading (9). [End Page 166]

These expansive definitions also explain the book’s structure, where an introductory first chapter is followed by five further chapters, each of which pairs a text or group of texts with a particular reading community. Beginning with small clusters like the elite coteries associated with the court, universities, or Inns of Court, and gradually widening their scope to consider the reading experiences of much larger reading publics, these case studies suggest that understanding what members of Shakespeare’s audiences were reading can help recover possible early readings of his texts. Each chapter therefore first establishes what is known about the early circulation of a certain text or textual tradition before examining how a cluster of readers familiar with that text or tradition might have responded to one of Shakespeare’s plays or poems.

The second and third chapters take as their focus two texts designed for elite consumption: Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Machiavelli’s Prince. Arguing that the humanist education enjoyed by readers of these texts informed their interpretative strategies for the Sonnets and Henry V, respectively, Clegg sheds new and important light on the circulation of these Italian works, and revises the long-held view that Machiavelli’s writings were little read in Elizabethan England. The Inns of Courts lawyers likely to have read The Prince remain in view in chapter 4, which examines vernacular legal treatises. In this chapter, Clegg shows how an idea expressed in these treatises—that English law was “distinct from and superior to the laws of other nations”(97) in regarding women as freeborn with their own rights and privileges—may have helped audiences respond complexly to “the sometimes problematic treatment of women across three genres of Shakespeare plays” (20). Showing how treatises by Christopher St German and John Fortescue were marketed widely, this chapter suggests that men and women with an interest or involvement in their own highly litigious society were likely to have brought their legal reading to bear on their interpretation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello.

Religious writing dominated the early modern book trade, and the fifth chapter...

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